6 Questions For A Digital Media Manager

Welcome back to “6 Questions For A…”! Each week, we’ll ask someone 6 career-centric questions about themselves.

This week we are featuring Jackie Pecquex, a Digital Media Manager at KW2 in Madison, Wisconsin. With 6 years in the industry under her belt, we thought she’d be able to shed some insight into what it’s really like to work in digital media.

1. Tell us about the kind of tasks are in a typical day in your role.

As a digital media manager for a small agency, I lead all paid digital media strategy, planning and execution. That covers advertising channels like paid search, paid social media, online display, video and more. At any given time, I might be working with 10 different clients. A typical day might include:

• Monitoring current ad performance for Google paid search campaigns
• Presenting a report to a client
• Developing a digital media channel recommendation
• Forecasting business results from paid media
• Making recommendations to improve a website experience for traffic from paid media

2. What is your favorite part of your job?

Business problem-solving. I love working with clients who have real business problems like slowed revenue growth and getting to show them how adjustments to their marketing can turn that around. Helping people and businesses succeed is so rewarding.

3. What are some challenges you face?

The number one challenge in my role is clients that aren’t engaged. Having feedback and investment from clients is crucial for ongoing improvements to paid digital media strategy. When clients can tell us “this is what’s happening with my business this week” we can help them address that issue. When they don’t, we can’t.

4. Who inspires you and why?

Sorry if this is corny, but my coworkers inspire me. Working at a small (20 person) ad agency has its benefits. I have access to some incredible minds in UX, content strategy, business development and more. Being in such close proximity to experts has helped round out my knowledge in areas I wouldn’t have exposure to at a larger agency.

5. Share some advice to someone aspiring to work in digital media!

At my desk, I keep a post-it note of the best advice I have been given in my career – explain like you’re talking to your mom. Working in digital media means being a data translator. The language you speak is impressions, conversions, bounce rates; and you need to be fluent in that. But not everyone speaks that language. To be effective, you need to be able to talk to people in their language. The most critical skill to have is to be able to communicate the insights from data in a way that makes people listen and act.

6. What did you want to be when you grew up? How did that change over the years?

For most of my childhood, I wanted to be a teacher. When you’re young, you don’t really comprehend the variety of careers that exist, and you’re limited to what you’re exposed to through family, friends and the media.

By the time I got to high school, I was aware of more career options and decided I wanted to work in genetics. Genetics had fascinated me since middle school, and when I realized it could be a career, I shrugged off the teacher idea.

Then in college, I started taking chemistry as a degree requirement. I hated it. No matter how hard I studied, the concepts didn’t seem to sink in. At the same time, I was taking a journalism & mass communication class, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. There were a lot of job opportunities available in mass comm, so I decided to switch. When I was in the degree program, I found my field specifically (media planning), got hired at an agency and started doing digital media. To me, it’s the perfect blend of left brain and right brain work.

Interested in learning more about Jackie? You can find her on LinkedIn!